Understanding Mixed Messages in Baltimore’s War Against Crime

The Wire has been hailed as one of the best-written shows in American television history. Its fictional depiction of life in some of Baltimore’s poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods helped highlight some of the issues that millions of Americans face each year. In reality, Baltimore continues to have problems but makes progress in its fight against violent crime.

One effort to make headway is the Safe Streets program, an outreach program designed to directly engage high-risk youth and mediate street disputes before they turn violent. In their Journal of Urban Health article, “Effects of Baltimore’s Safe Streets Program on Gun Violence: A Replication of Chicago’s CeaseFire Program,” authors Daniel W. Webster, Jennifer Mendel Whitehill, Jon S. Varnick, and Frank C. Curriero examine the efficacy of Baltimore’s attempts to make its streets safer. In sum, they find mixed results.

Between 2007 and 2010 the Baltimore City Health Department received a federal grant to operate an intervention program modeled after Chicago’s CeaseFire program. Although Baltimore’s program, Safe Streets, lacks the specialized “violence interrupters” that made Chicago’s program famous, it retained the core mission of using outreach workers to engage high-risk youths and directly mediate street conflicts. Safe Streets began operation in the McElderry Park neighborhood and expanded to three other communities that all ranked in the upper quartile of the Baltimore Police Department’s homicide and nonfatal shooting statistics for the prior three years. Subsequently, three neighborhoods – Ellwood Park, Madison-Eastend, and Cherry Hill – were phased in between February and November of 2008.

The authors compared the four neighborhoods to similar communities in Baltimore to obtain an exact measure of the difference that Safe Streets made. After using various statistical controls to attempt to make the outcomes as clear as possible, the authors found mixed results. In Cherry Hill – the neighborhood not geographically close to the other three – the study found that homicides were reduced by over 55 percent while nonfatal shootings dropped 34 percent. Results from the other neighborhoods, however, were less consistent. Over the whole study period, McElderry Park saw a 26 percent decrease in homicides concurrent with a 22 percent increase in nonfatal shootings. The other two neighborhoods also saw inconsistent and counterintuitive results. Madison-Eastend saw homicides increase 2.7-fold while nonfatal shootings dropped by 44 percent. Ellwood Park saw no statistically significant change in homicides and a 34 percent reduction in nonfatal shootings.

While these results are at first confusing, Webster et al. suggest that details about the implementation of the program might shed light on the true effects. Most significantly, McElderry Park, the first neighborhood to receive Safe Streets, served as the headquarters for intervention efforts in Ellwood Park and Madison-Eastend. Because these three communities were geographically contiguous, staff all worked out of the original McElderry Park office. Often, staff assigned to McElderry Park would assist staff in other neighborhoods, and the number of interventions there fluctuated, especially as the programs in the neighboring areas were implemented. This may have contributed to conflicting results in McElderry Park. Indeed, when examining results in the period before the new programs were added, the authors observed a homicide reduction of 53 percent and a statistically insignificant increase in the number of nonfatal shootings. While these results are hardly conclusive, they suggest that the limited resources available to the staff may have hindered their ability to successfully implement their program.

Webster et al. note that as with any non-experimental design, their examination could be subject to unconsidered bias. They note spikes in gang violence in Madison-Eastend and large numbers of illegal firearms arrests in McElderry Park as just some of the time dependent variables that may mask the results. However, their study emphasizes the importance of doing stringent evaluation and the continuing potential of CeaseFire-style crime interventions. Cities across the country – including Baltimore – are seeing significantly lower crime levels than a few decades ago. As cities continue to work to improve public safety, this study serves as a reminder of the difficulty of observing program effects and that even mixed results may still offer important lessons.

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